Pam Austin, Ballad Health senior vice president and chief information officer (CIO), was recently recognized statewide as a finalist for the Tennessee CIO of the Year ORBIE Awards.
Presented by TennesseeCIO, the ORBIE Awards honor chief information officers who have demonstrated excellence in technology leadership and are driving innovation and transforming Tennessee’s leading organizations. Austin was among five finalists in the Large Corporate category, which includes Tennessee organizations with up to $2.1 billion in annual revenue.
“Whatever success I have is directly tied to our IT team,” she said. “I want to thank the team for doing the work that made my selection as a finalist possible. It’s all about our team!”
Leading up to the awards banquet in Nashville, each finalist was asked to write a short summary for their bio.
“I was promoted to CIO in February 2020 right before the pandemic hit,” Pam wrote. “Our charge was to implement Epic at 12 hospitals and 200 physician practices and replace 16,000 computers by October 2020. A daunting task, but the team never gave up, they worked hard, they worked day and night and focused on succeeding. Our team has many great accomplishments, but this one tops the list. During the pandemic and my first year as CIO, the team pulled off what seemed to be impossible. A dynamic team made it happen – words are not adequate enough to praise this group of professionals.”
She was accompanied to the awards banquet by several members of the IT team, and several dozen others from the Ballad Health IT department watched the livestreamed event.
Pam said she plans to establish a networking group with several of the CIO finalists and their leadership teams to help identify best practices that will work in our technology environment and could help avoid costly mistakes others have already encountered and overcome.
Other finalists were Dena Campbell of Vaco; David Jacques with St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital; Mike Ward from Covenant Health; and Steve Hitchings from Kenco, who was selected Tennessee CIO of the Year in the category.
The ORBIE finalists were also interviewed on camera and some of their comments were included in a short video that features all five contenders. Here’s the video as posted to Vimeo; Pam is the first one to speak, and she talks for about a minute.
